The Wages of Guilt

by Ian Buruma

  Officially Japan has no army, navy, or air force. In 1946 the Japanese, under the eyes of the American occupation, were presented with a constitution which states, in Article Nine, that “the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation.” And that “land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained.” The Self-Defense Forces are a rather shaky compromise. But in fact Japan has a fairly large military, which it is constitutionally unable to dispatch.

  When the Cold War began around 1950, the Americans no longer wanted Japan to remain a permanently disarmed model of pacifism. So a National Police Reserve was created. The left protested, but without success. Then a U.S.-Japan Security Treaty was signed, again despite much Japanese protest. Richard Nixon, on a visit to Japan in 1953, said that Article Nine had been a mistake. Many Japanese conservatives agreed, but their view didn’t prevail. The Cold War heated up, Japanese business, partly thanks to the Korean War, began to boom, and the left lost more and more ground. The Self-Defense Forces were then legalized under circumstances many Japanese still regard as dubious and unconstitutional.

  In the main building of the Self-Defense Agency, as nondescript inside as outside, I had an appointment with Hagi Jiro, deputy director general of the agency. His office was basic, even spartan: a desk, a sofa, a cupboard, and some steel filing cabinets. On the wall was a calendar with pinup pictures of teenage girls on a Pacific beach. Hagi was a thin man dressed in a blue suit. I asked him about Japanese public opinion. What did most people think Japan should do about the Gulf War? He said the majority were against sending any Japanese troops. In November 1990, a special bill proposing just that had to be dropped. Most Japanese, he said, still associated the military with the old Imperial Army. But this varied from generation to generation. People with memories of World War II, he said, were very much opposed to sending Japanese soldiers to fight on any front. People between the ages of thirty and fifty felt less strongly about this. And young people could be swayed easily one way or the other by the mass media.

  He mentioned Article Nine of the Japanese constitution. And as so often happened in Germany, the question of trust came up. Hagi said: “The Japanese people do not trust the Self-Defense Forces because they cannot trust themselves as Japanese. This is why they need the constitution to block security efforts.”

  It was an interesting phrase: cannot trust themselves as Japanese. It came back at the end of our conversation. I told Hagi that I had just arrived from Germany. He smiled and said something unexpected: “I like the Germans very much, but I think they are a dangerous people. I don’t know why—perhaps it is race, or culture, or history. Whatever. But we Japanese are the same: we swing from one extreme to the other. As peoples, we Japanese, like the Germans, have strong collective discipline. When our energies are channeled in the right direction, this is fine, but when they are misused, terrible things happen.” Here he paused. Then he added: “I also happen to think Japanese and Germans are racists.”

  This was, of course, what many people believed. It was what I had been taught to believe, that the Germans and Japanese were dangerous peoples, that there was something flawed in their national characters. But it was not what I had expected to hear at the defense headquarters of Japan. Linking the two nations, however, as Hagi had done, was something Germans, in my experience, tended to avoid. I often heard the phrase “typically German” from Germans, almost always in a derogatory sense. (“Typically Japanese,” on the other hand, is usually said by Japanese with a mixture of defensiveness and pride.) Yet to be put in the same category as the Japanese—even to be compared—bothered many Germans. (Again, unlike the Japanese, who made the comparison often.) Germans I met often stressed how different they were from the Japanese, just as Wessies emphasized their differences from Ossies. It had occurred to me that the Dorian Gray factor might have been at work. To some West Germans, now so “civilized,” so free, so individualistic, so, well, Western, the Japanese, with their group discipline, their deference to authority, their military attitude toward work, might appear too close for comfort to a self-image only just, and perhaps only barely, overcome.

  This is not entirely without reason. Japan learned many things from Germany during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which no longer fit the liberal climate of the Federal Republic. Like Germany, Japan—as represented by its intellectuals and politicians—often felt the need to compensate for a feeling of national inferiority by turning to romantic nationalism. Fichte’s theories of organic nationalism were imported to bolster Japanese self-esteem, even as Japan was Westernizing itself to catch up with Western might. Spengler’s ideas on the decline of the West were comforting when Japan felt excluded by the Western powers in the 1920s and 1930s. But most of these theories, adapted to Japanese needs, are still widely quoted, on television, at universities, and in popular journals. Fantasies about Jewish conspiracies to dominate the world somehow got frozen in the outer reaches of Japanese folk mythology. And the ideology of pure race, much encouraged before the war by imported German notions, is anything but extinct in Japan.

  In Hitler’s Germany, Japan was admired for having achieved, instinctively, what German Nazism aspired to. In the words of one Albrecht Fürst von Urach, a Nazi propagandist, Japanese emperor worship was “the most unique fusion in the world of state form, state consciousness, and religious fanaticism.” Fanaticism was, of course, a positive word in the Nazi lexicon. Reading Nazi books on Japan, one might think that German propagandists wished to instill in the German people, through propaganda, a culture like the one that was handed down to the Japanese by their ancient gods.

  To what extent the behavior of nations, like that of individual people, is determined by history, culture, or character is a question that exercises many Japanese, almost obsessively. There was not much sign of betroffenheit on Japanese television during the Gulf War. Nor did one see retired generals explain tactics and strategy. Instead, there were experts from journalism and academe talking in a detached manner about a faraway war which was often presented as a cultural or religious conflict between West and Middle East. The history of Muslim-Christian-Jewish animosity was much discussed. And the American character was analyzed at length to understand the behavior of George Bush and General Schwarzkopf.

  The cultural preoccupations cropped up in private conversations too. I met some Japanese friends for a drink in one of the last streets in Tokyo to have remained unchanged since the war. It is in an area called Golden Gai, which used to be a cheap red-light district. We sat in a tiny bar, with room for about ten people. The name of the bar was taken from an avant-garde French film and the voice of Billie Holiday filled the smoky air; the bar prided itself on its intellectual clientele. The majority opinion in the bar was that the Gulf War was fought only for American interests. My friends were all in their early forties, active in the arts. They saw the Gulf War as a question of cultural identity. The Americans wanted to make the Arabs conform to the American view of the world.

  What about freedom and democracy? I asked. Weren’t those principles worth defending? Should one allow an aggressive nation to invade another? I knew this was not entirely convincing; Kuwait was hardly a democracy. But I wanted to draw them out. The answer was an interesting variation of anti-Western rhetoric.

  “Democracy,” said a cartoonist, “is not universal. It is only a Western ideal, which Westerners pretend is universal. That’s why this war is wrong: the West is trying to impose its ideas on a non-Western nation. The Americans are not only hypocritical, they are arrogant.”

  A well-known filmmaker nodded vigorously and said that Japan would have been better off if the Americans had never come. He was referring to the arrival in Japan of Commodore Perry’s black ships in 1853. “They have robbed us of our culture,” he said. “We hardly know who we are anymore.”

  I knew him well enough to know that this was said as a provocation. But conversations with Japanese artists and intellectuals often t
ake this turn: the identity question nags in almost any discussion about Japan and the outside world. It leads to odd identifications. In the left-leaning Asahi Shimbun, I read the following letter, written by Nakamura Tetsu, a medical doctor of the ’68 generation active in the Middle East: “When speaking of the New World Order, we must understand our brethren in Asia whose sense of values and culture is not shared by the West. We must rethink our attitude toward Asia. Only fifty years ago it was we Japanese, caught between our traditional society and Western-style modernization, who suffered a war against America. That war is not concluded yet. It is time to think again about the meaning of the several million [sic] ‘sacred spirits’ sacrificed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

  This comes remarkably close in tone and thinking to Pan-Asian Japanese nationalism of the thirties and forties. The idea that Japan had been struggling violently, sometimes clumsily, but still always nobly, against Western domination of Asia since the nineteenth century is not new. It started in the 1860s with the movement to “throw out the barbarians and revere the emperor.” It was promoted in Japanese war propaganda. It was defended in a famous book published in 1964 entitled In Affirmation of the Great East Asian War by Hayashi Fusao. Hayashi’s anti-Western nationalism was the model for right-wing apologetics after the war. But Hayashi was a former Communist. And he wrote that in an ideal world, in which Japan would no longer be divided by international politics, all Japanese would think alike. As he put it: “One Japanese way of thinking will be born.” There was nostalgia in these words. During the Pacific War, the Japanese people were told that “a hundred million [Japanese] hearts beat as one.”

  This ideal world was not yet at hand during the Gulf War. In a public opinion poll conducted by the Asahi Shimbun, 70 percent of the people were against using armed force against Iraq, but 29.6 percent of those in their twenties were in favor of it, and at least as many said they were not sure. Nakamura’s letter in the Asahi was an emotional variation of a common theme among letter writers to that newspaper. A typical one read: “Now, of all times, we Japanese have the right, as well as the duty, to oppose war and tell the world about our own experiences, how our innocent civilians were sacrificed by terrible bombings.”

  This, to many Japanese, was the point of Article Nine. When the Prime Minister of Japan, Shidehara Kijuro, protested in 1946 to General MacArthur that it was all very well saying that Japan should assume moral leadership in renouncing war, but that in the real world no country would follow this example, MacArthur replied: “Even if no country follows you, Japan will lose nothing. It is those who do not support this who are in the wrong.” For a long time most Japanese continued to take this view. The Gulf War put a dent in it.

  It was a respectable view, but also one founded on a national myth of betrayal. Japan, according to the myth, had become the unique moral nation of peace, betrayed by the victors who had sat in judgment of Japan’s war crimes; betrayed in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, in Nicaragua; betrayed by the arms race, betrayed by the Cold War; Japan had been victimized not only by the “gratuitous,” perhaps even “racist,” nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but by all subsequent military actions taken by the superpowers, including the decision to go to war against Saddam Hussein. The most fervent believers in the myth were men and women of the left, who clung to Article Nine as a priest to his book of prayers.

  Several months after the Gulf War had formally ended, a literary critic named Matsumoto Kenichi wrote an article for the Tokyo Shimbun in which he compared Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait to the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor. It was the counterpart, in a way, to Enzensberger’s comparison of Saddam and Hitler in Der Spiegel. Saddam’s claim, wrote Matsumoto, that he was fighting for Pan-Arab ideals “eerily echoed the Japanese militarists who, on the eve of Pearl Harbor, arrogantly proclaimed that ‘Asia is one.’ ” Both Iraq and Japan fought “holy wars” against Western imperialism. But the parallel, in Matsumoto’s opinion, went further: “Japan and Iraq went to war for virtually identical reasons.” Western powers were accused of making war inevitable, by depriving those countries of trade and raw materials. Thus war for Japan and Iraq had supposedly become a matter of survival. “Japan,” wrote Matsumoto, “has not atoned for its wartime atrocities. So we can’t accuse the Iraqis of using inhuman methods and violating international law without pointing a finger at ourselves.”

  So far, so good. Introspection of this kind is rare in the mainstream Japanese press. But then the accusing finger suddenly swiveled around: “On the other hand, the response of America’s mass media to the initial air attacks on Iraq recalled Japan’s euphoric accounts of its early victories in the Pacific …” And the conclusion: “The Gulf conflict reminded me once again of the banality and cruelty of war. I was appalled when our Prime Minister, Kaifu Toshiki, expressed his firm support for the multinational coalition and attempted to deploy our Self-Defense Forces to the Middle East. Conservative politicians here appear to have learned little from Japan’s own descent into barbarism just fifty years ago.”

  We are left with the conclusion, then, that all were equally barbarous: wartime Japan, Saddam Hussein, George Bush, Japanese conservative politicians. The pacifist aim may be a virtuous one, and skepticism about the euphoric American press might have been just, but there was something too conveniently indiscriminate about this view. All wars are unjust: it was like the warning post on the market square in Bonn, or the peace professor who thought the bombing of Baghdad was the greatest war crime since 1945. Too much history was thrpwn into one basket.

  But there was one huge difference with Germany: Israel. Japanese did not feel guilty about the Jews; there were no hysterical calls to the Israeli embassy in Tokyo; there was no Japanese Wolf Biermann. For many Germans, the Gulf War recalled visions of the Holocaust; to most Japanese it was just another war, another faraway war, which erupted like a natural disaster. Perhaps if the target of allied bombs had not been Iraq, but China, or even North Korea, Japanese war guilt would have been a factor. But even those Japanese who feel bad about China and Korea do not think of the Japanese war as a Holocaust.

  The denial of historical discrimination is not just a way to evade guilt. It is intrinsic to pacifism. To even try to distinguish between wars, to accept that some wars are justified, is already an immoral position. What is so convenient in the cases of Germany and Japan is that pacifism happens to be a high-minded way to dull the pain of historical guilt. Or, conversely, if one wallows in it, pacifism turns national guilt into a virtue, almost a mark of superiority, when compared to the complacency of other nations. It can also be the cause of historical myopia.

  Oda Makoto, the father of the anti–Vietnam War movement in Japan and the author of a novel about the bombing of Hiroshima, told me that Japan had to remain a pacifist nation: “Japan, of all nations, must be a conscientious objector.” As a military power, Oda said, Japan would be a very dangerous country. And so would Germany. Soon, he thought, Germany would be a pure-race country again. When I expressed some doubt, he said that I, as a Westerner, as a white man, was in no position to judge.

  I asked him about the Vietnam War. He saw no difference between the Vietnam War and the Japanese war in Asia. Indeed, it was the Vietnam War that made him reflect on the Japanese conquest of Asia. Nor did he see any difference between European colonialism and the Japanese invasion of China and Southeast Asia. When I pointed out what I thought were differences, he became agitated and raised his voice. “Look,” he said, “I have no time to discuss historical distinctions. Colonialism is bad, and that’s that.” His plump face reddened, his big hands crashed on the table. His Korean-Japanese wife stared silently into her tea. I had been put in my place.

  Oda was born in 1932. He remembered how proud he had been, waving his Rising Sun flag after great military victories against the Americans. He could also remember, with particular bitterness, how his native city, Osaka, was bombed a day before the Japanese emperor announced on the radio that the war “had not dev
eloped in a way necessarily to Japan’s advantage” and that it was time to surrender. Oda did not cry, he said. His real bitterness concerned the way in which the Americans after the war wrecked Japan’s chances to break away from the past. It was the Americans who allowed the emperor to remain on his throne. It was the Americans who allowed the same bureaucrats and politicians who had led Japan into the war to continue ruling the country. It was the Americans who made the Japanese undermine their own constitution by building a new army, and it was the Americans who made the Japanese into accomplices of U.S. imperialism in Asia.

  His resentment was not without justification, but Oda’s ambivalence toward the West was more complicated than political disillusion. It was an ambivalence bordering on hostility. This might have been partly a matter of age. He had been educated, after all, to despise the “Anglo-American demons.” And Pan-Asian propaganda was not all that far removed from romantic Third Worldism. But despite Oda’s Third Worldist views, his identification with the oppressed was not straightforward either. He also identified with the oppressors. One of the aims of his “Peace for Vietnam” movement had been to help American deserters and antiwar protesters. In Oda’s view, the American GIs, like the Japanese Imperial Army soldiers before, were aggressors as well as victims; aggressors because they killed innocent people, victims because they were forced to do so.

  Feelings toward the West cannot be other than complex in Japan. On the surface, Japan is the most Westernized country in Asia. Even to Oda Makoto, New York probably feels closer than Beijing (and I daresay Tuscany would be more familiar than Dresden). Even as there was a movement during the nineteenth century to expel the barbarians, there was also a movement to “reject Asia.” In woodcuts of turn-of-the-century Japanese wars on the Asian continent, the Japanese are shown as large light-skinned figures in European uniforms, demonstrating their mastery over dwarfish yellow men in pigtails and silk coats.